Palaeoclimatology: Tropical ice

PUB. DATE

July 2009

SOURCE

Nature;7/16/2009, Vol. 460 Issue 7253, p308

SOURCE TYPE

Academic Journal

DOC. TYPE

Article

ABSTRACT

The article presents a study which examines compounds derived from tropical plants that were blown to high altitudes. Researchers from Ohio State University in Columbus headed by Matthew Makou found that tropical ice can reveal historical information about climate and vegetation through trapped aerosol such as dust, soot and complex molecules. Researchers suggest that stir-barsoptive extraction and thermal desorption methods is useful in reconstructing past characteristics of tropical areas.

The article comments on the paper "Changes in C3/C4 Vegetation in the Continental Interior of the Central Himalayas Associated With Monsoonal Paleoclimatic Changes During the Last 600 kyr" by M. Mampuku and colleagues. It addresses the change of C4/C3 vegetation in glacial and interglacial...

Discusses the use of the GENESIS global climate model to isolate the effect of vegetation changes on climate, as seen in the Miocene period. Model description; Model experiments; Comparison of zonally averaged surface temperatures of each simulation; Global cooling that led to extensive ice-cap...

The impact of vegetation-atmosphere and ocean-atmosphere interactions on the mid- to late Holocene climate change as well as their synergy is studied for different parts of the Asian monsoon region, giving consideration to the large climatic and topographical heterogeneity in that area. We...

The focus of this paper is on the reconstruction of the mid-Holocene climatic changes based on the pollen records contained in a 6.2 m thick section in the southern part of the Tengger Desert, northwestern China. To understand the modern analogues of the mid-Holocene changes, modern pollen...

The sensitivity of the last glacial-inception (around 115 kyr BP, 115,000 years before present) to different feedback mechanisms has been analysed by using the Earth system model of intermediate complexity CLIMBER-2. CLIMBER-2 includes dynamic modules of the atmosphere, ocean, terrestrial...

High-temporal resolution pollen record from the Alboran Sea ODP Site 976, pollen-based quantitative climate reconstruction and biomisation show that changes of Mediterranean vegetation have been clearly modulated by short and long term variability during the last 25 000 years. The reliability of...